The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 6 decided not to take up Missouri’s bid to reinstate a stalled state law that prevents police from enforcing certain federal firearms laws.
The law, signed in 2021 by Missouri’s then-Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, is known as the Second Amendment Preservation Act.
The statute declares that some federal gun restrictions run afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, which protects the right to “keep and bear arms.” Specifically, the state statute said that some federal regulations about the sale, possession, confiscation, transfer, or taxation of firearms constituted infringements of the Second Amendment.
The law provided for fines of up to $50,000 on state and local officials for enforcing federal gun laws that the state legislature deemed inconsistent with the Second Amendment.
The Department of Justice under President Joe Biden filed suit challenging the state law.
In 2023, U.S. District Judge Brian Wimes halted the law’s enforcement.
In August 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed Wimes’s ruling and held that the statute conflicted with the supremacy clause of the Constitution, which provides that federal laws prevail over conflicting state laws.
The Supreme Court turned away the petition in Missouri v. United States in an unsigned order on Oct. 6.
The court did not explain its decision. No justices dissented.
Missouri filed its petition three days after President Donald Trump’s second term began.
The state argued that it was entitled to enact its law under the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.
That amendment states that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
Before this case, no federal court had ever prevented a state from “exercising 10th Amendment authority simply because of the reason the state expressed for exercising that authority,” the petition stated.
The petition stated that in this case, the Eighth Circuit struck down the Missouri law “solely because the act said the legislature believes certain federal statutes are unconstitutional.”
This ruling created splits among federal courts of appeals and is “as wrong as it is unprecedented,” it stated.
In other words, the Eighth Circuit found that the state law was unconstitutional solely because of the legislative findings contained in the statute that expressed the state legislature’s opinion “that some federal statutes are unconstitutional,” the petition said.
Legislative findings are factual statements in legislation that provide a rationale or background for the legislation.
Sometimes, courts look to the findings in an effort to understand why a law was enacted.
Here, the court “took no issue with what Missouri’s law does, only with what the legislative findings say,” the petition stated.
The Eighth Circuit stated that a law that had the same effect, “but different findings, would be permissible.”
That court provided an example, saying the state may “lawfully withhold its assistance from federal law enforcement” if it chooses a different “reason,” such as withholding resources “as a matter of policy,” the petition stated.
On June 10, the Department of Justice, under the Trump administration, urged the Supreme Court not to take up Missouri’s petition.
Missouri misstated the Eighth Circuit’s holding and claimed that the court found that the state lost its 10th Amendment right to decline to enforce federal gun laws “merely because the State’s ‘reason’ or ‘motive’ for invoking that right was the belief that those laws violated the Second Amendment,” the Justice Department stated.
Instead, the circuit court found that the state “went beyond non-enforcement by using the improper ‘means’ of ‘purporting to invalidate federal law,’” the department said.
The Justice Department said that although the state’s objections are “flawed,” the constitutionality of some provisions in the law “raises more difficult questions than the Eighth Circuit recognized.”
Even though the Biden administration, which left office on Jan. 20, was challenging specific provisions to which it objected, the current Trump administration has decided that it does not wish to contest those provisions in court, according to the department.
If the case returns to the federal district court that first heard it, the Trump administration will not object to a motion by the state under federal court rules to narrow the legal remedies that the state is seeking, the Justice Department said.
Reuters contributed to this report.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Oct. 6, 2025, in The Epoch Times.